We are pleased to announce the availability of EiffelStudio 6.6.

I've recently been toying with the idea of ephemeral classes. An ephemeral class is a class which does not have attributes. The immediate benefits of such classes is that their features can be used for objectless calls, the same way we can access constants or external features.

Introduction

Originally Eiffel Software's object serialization was written in C and was proposing the following alternative:

• basic: the same version of the executable on a particular platform can store and retrieve objects.
• general: different versions of the executable on a particular platform can store and retrieve objects.
• independent: different versions of the ex

I'm not sure if this feature was noticed by many so I figured out I would write an entry on the matter. Starting with 6.5 we have added the notion of transient attribute to our runtime. Transient attributes are not stored to disk and thus their absence in the storable file means that they can safely be ignored upon retrieval.

It can be useful in many scenarios.

Here are the answers for the quiz of last week:

1. b=2
2. b=2
3. b=2 and an exception
4. b=4 and no exception
5. returns 2
6. returns 1 and b=2

The difficult ones where definitely the last 3.

Last week I was at the LASER 2009 summer school on Software Testing. It was pretty interesting and one brief talk captured my attention. The speaker, Martin Nordio, asked the audience if they knew Eiffel and only a few hands were raised. So he asked if they knew Java instead. Everyone raised his hand.

Recently one of our customer found a loss of precision in their floating point arithmetic computations involving REAL_32 and REAL_64. This loss can be seen in the code below:

make
	local
		x: REAL_32
		y: REAL_64
		z: REAL_64
	do
		x := 0
		y := 1.123456789012345
		z := x + y
	end

Last night I've upgraded my iPod Touch to the latest iPhone OS 3.0 and its corresponding SDK. The OS upgrade went smoothly. However for the SDK, what I had done was not working when I switch the include path to use the 3.0 SDK because it also required GCC 4.2 (by default it is GCC 4.0).

Here it is: my first graphical iPhone/iPod Touch application entirely written in Eiffel using EiffelStudio:

Nothing really fancy but it shows that it is doable. At the moment, you can test your Eiffel applications using either the iPhone Simulator or the actual device.

I was lucky to get my hands on an iPod Touch. The first thing I did was to install SSH, gcc, subversion, vim, gdb et voila! Checked out the source of the Eiffel Software runtime. Tonight, I'll compile the runtime and run our regression test suite on it to make sure everything works properly.

When this is done, I'll look at how to use Eiffel for iPhone/iPod Touch development.